Picking a Pick and Pack Fulfillment House

Pick and Pack – How to Choose

If you plan to invest in outsourced pick and pack fulfillment, you want to get the highest possible return on your investment. You need more than just a commodity provider – especially if your company and customers demand the highest quality. Pick and pack operations are at the core of any fulfillment process. Everything has to be just right, or quality becomes an unfulfilled dream.

So here are some thoughts on how to choose the right pick and pack fulfillment house for you.

You have to be picky.

Pardon our pun, but not all fulfillment houses can provide consistently exceptional pick and pack or related services. It takes a special kind of dedication – an innate understanding that wowing the end-customer is the ultimate goal.

You need a partner that can actually do everything you need. So first ask yourself why you’re looking for a pick and pack fulfillment house. The most common concerns we hear are:

• Desire to offload logistics to focus on mission-critical product development and marketing.
• Need to improve consistency and quality of customer service – you aren’t meeting “high touch” expectations, at least not all the time.
• Current inability to take volume fluctuations in stride, resulting in service failures and/or unnecessarily high costs.

Now ask yourself how your prospective pick and pack fulfillment house stacks up:

• Are they physically equipped to smoothly handle your needs – including those pesky volume fluctuations – quickly and accurately?
• What safety and security precautions and procedures are in place to protect your merchandise and data? Shrinkage costs you money, but a breach of confidential customer or company data could be devastating. If your products require specialized warehousing or handling conditions, can the pick and pack fulfillment house guarantee compliance?
• Do they have a high touch culture, where every employee is committed to your customer? Does that high touch commitment extend to their own people? (Their turnover rate speaks volumes here.)

It comes down to this: do they understand what Customer Lifetime Value means to your business, and do they understand their role in raising that CLV? It’s easy to give this lip service, so ask what performance metrics they use to evaluate themselves and prove to you they are the best possible partner. You can use our handy tool to compare your current fulfillment results to industry best practices.

Choosing the right pick and pack fulfillment house is a combination of fact-finding and gut feeling. So, finally, ask whether you can visit your candidate’s facility, to see for yourself how they work. Ask if you can meet their team, too, because they are the folks you’ll entrust with your customers’ care. Nothing matters more than that.

Now that you know a bit more about pick-and-pack, you can take one of the following three steps to continue journey in finding the top fulfillment companies.

• Download this free e-book on Choosing a Fulfillment Partner.
• Take a Fulfillment Needs Assessment to score your current state of affairs.
• Contact a fulfillment expert to have a live one-on-one conversation

Want to take advantage of Fulfillment Center benefits to make more money, save time, and create better customer relationships? Find the best Fulfillment Center and Fulfillment Warehouse for you.